fire on my tongue (ice in my veins)
by amazonziti
Summary: Jessica doesn't find out that she's a werewolf until she's fifteen. (A Jessica Pearson origin story.)


**Author Notes:** Listen. I wrote most of this back in the summer of 2012, when I was actively watching _Suits_. I don't remember exactly when I stopped watching, but it was more or less because there was never enough Jessica and/or Jessica/Harvey moments for me. I'm so excited for _Pearson_, and hopefully all the Jessica I can handle. So I'm posting what I've got so far, very nearly seven years to the day after I started it. Hashtag finally.

Deep thanks to leupagus, who went REALLY in-depth with me about this fic on gchat seven years ago.

**Story Notes:** This story has been crossposted to Ao3. Title is lyrics from Zayde Wølf's "Cold Blooded". Jessica's family members are completely made up, as we didn't have any canon information about them back when I originally wrote this. The werewolves in this fic are based (more or less) on _Teen Wolf_ S1-S2 (fanon) werewolf rules. No canon _Teen Wolf_ characters will appear in this fic. Nora Deaton was originally going to be Alan Deaton's sister, but *shrug*. For whatever it's worth, I imagined her as Christine Adams.

**Story Warnings:** Some violence/gore (not too graphic for werewolves); domestic violence; patricide; standard private school racism.

**Chapter Word Count:** 3,996

* * *

**fire on my tongue (ice in my veins)**

PROLOGUE

_New York, March 1989_

Jessica doesn't find out that she's a werewolf until she's fifteen.

She's in the tenth grade, second in her class at a Manhattan prep school. It's an unseasonably warm Friday at the end of March. As they do every Friday, classes end at two o'clock instead of at four. Her satchel slung over her shoulder and her coat and scarf over her arm, Jessica follows the flood of girls downstairs into the lobby. As she's walking through the foyer, Nora Deaton from reception calls out to her. "Miss Pearson!"

"Hi, Nora," Jessica says, a little uneasy. Nora Deaton is one of the only black staff or faculty at the school, and Jessica is one of the few black students; the other girls stare when they talk.

"I've got a note for you from your mom," Nora says. She bends her neatly-coiffed head to rummage through her desk drawers as Jessica steps up to the reception counter. "Where did I...? Oh, here we go." She offers a letter, which Jessica folds and tucks into the breast pocket of her blazer.

"Thanks, Nora."

"You're welcome, Miss Pearson." And _that's_ never not weird, being addressed so respectfully by an adult that everybody calls by her first name like she's a child. Jessica's mom taught her better than that, but Jessica had gotten such strange looks from the other girls when she'd called Nora "Ms. Deaton" that she'd stopped. Jessica tries to pick her battles here, but she feels kind of gross for having surrendered this one.

"Have a good weekend, Nora," Jessica says.

"You too, Miss Pearson," Nora says, and Jessica nods and escapes outside.

There's a long line of town cars idling at the curb in front of the school; Jessica waves to a few of her classmates' drivers and ducks out of the crowd at the front doors. She heads west on 84th Street and, as the weekend noise from the school falls away behind her, unfolds Mom's note to read as she walks.

It's typed on good paper printed with the school's letterhead, with the date and time of dictation (today, 12:35 PM) marked in the upper right corner. It takes Jessica a moment to process its meaning:

_Darling,_

_Why don't you ask Elizabeth or one of the other girls if you can stay with them this weekend? Your father's come home unexpectedly and I think we'll be caught up for a while._

_Love,_

_Mom_

Jessica stops dead halfway to York Avenue, staring down at the most terrifying words she's ever read, and tries to remember to breathe. She's suddenly freezing, but the cold's not like a chill; it's fear coming from inside her, spreading up and out from the base of her spine, flooding her hips and pelvis and stomach with ice, making her bones ache. "Oh my God," she says. It's the sound of her own voice that gets her moving again.

The only way home is to take the bus across town, then the subway up. Jessica doesn't have the money for a taxi, and to ask a friend for a ride - to put them in danger of getting caught up in this - is unthinkable. Jessica purses her lips so they'll stop trembling. She folds the letter once more and puts it back in the breast of her blazer behind the school crest, with her crisp pocket square. She tugs at the hem of her skirt and her blazer, the strap of her satchel, shifts her grip on her coat: everything is secure. She runs.

Like a miracle, the M-86 is just pulling up as she gets to the corner of York and 86th Street. She fumbles for a token, but the driver recognizes the school's blue tartan uniform and waves her on. "Thank you," Jessica says.

"No problem," says the driver.

There's an empty double seat. Jessica sits down hard, sliding her satchel and coat into the window seat, and tries to think. Mom must have seen Dad coming, somehow, and had time to call the school to warn her. Mom will need help, and the only person who knows enough to be useful is Jessica. She'll have to be better than just vicious; she'll have to be _smart_, like they've planned, because Dad will try to use them against each other. He's used Jessica as a hostage against Mom before, so he could have his fun and then get away.

This time, Jessica thinks, assessing the contents of her satchel, will be different. This time, she and Mom will finally kill him.

She's got her cotton shorts and T-shirt from PE, easy to move around in, fresh from the school's laundry. She's got textbooks and notebooks, which are heavy and pretty useless. She's got her keys, and she's got sharps in a canvas pencil case: scissors and a drawing compass and, best of all, an X-Acto knife from her drafting class.

She's got a full bottle of water, which she opens now, bracing herself against the rocking of the bus. She slips her locket on its silver chain over her head and opens the catch with a flick of her thumbnail. When the bus jerks to a stop at Lexington Avenue, Jessica tilts the contents of the locket into the bottle of water, caps the bottle, and shakes it up as hard as she can. The dried flakes of wolfsbane dissolve almost immediately in a bloom of smoky pale blue that turns the entire bottle opaque. She stows the bottle in her satchel and puts the chain back on, hiding the locket under the starched collar of her uniform shirt.

The bus speeds through the park. Jessica gets off at Central Park West and takes the train to 103rd Street. Walking as fast as she can down 104th in the afternoon sunlight, she does her best to stay calm, breathing evenly and keeping her expression steady. She's among friends and neighbors once she crosses Columbus, and she can't have them worrying or stopping by to check on her and Mom. Dad's proven before that he has no problem with collateral damage.

Jessica and Mom's apartment is in a grand old building between Columbus and Amsterdam, directly across the street from the Projects where they used to live. Jessica enters through the gloomy courtyard the way she usually does, but takes the stairs instead of the elevator from the lobby.

At the fourth floor landing, wrinkling her nose against the terrible smell in the stairwell and trying not to let any unclothed part of her touch the floor, Jessica changes hurriedly, slipping her shorts on under her skirt and wrestling her T-shirt on under her button-down before taking off her uniform, rolling it up tightly and stuffing it into her satchel. The bottle of wolfsbane water she sticks in her waistband at the small of her back; thankfully the elastic waistband of her gym shorts is tight enough that the bottle stays put. The scissors, compass and capped X-Acto knife she stows carefully in either side of her athletic bra, along with her keys to the apartment. The silver locket stays on. She takes her hair down from its pretty, if precarious, updo and yanks it ruthlessly into a tight bun. Some loose curls, too short to tie back but long enough to be a nuisance, fall in her face. She tucks them away with bobby pins.

Her heavy coat and satchel full of books will undoubtedly be more trouble than they're worth if Dad's waiting for her just inside the door. There's really no safe place to leave them, damn it; she has no good explanation for why she'd need to drop them with a neighbor, and if she leaves them here on the landing they might get stolen - or, worse, somebody well-meaning might recognize them as hers and try to return them to her, getting themselves killed in the process. In the end, she forces the staircase window open and stows her things on the fire escape. Hopefully she'll live to come back and get them.

Jessica pats herself down, wiggles to make sure the water bottle is secure, and pulls the heavy door to the fourth floor open. From four she takes the rickety elevator one floor up; her element of surprise is, hopefully, in the measures she's taken to arm herself, not in her arrival. Dad will hear her once she's on their floor. Let him think she's coming home from school like it's any other day. Let him think she's unprepared.

She slips her keys from her bra and lets them jingle as she unlocks the deadbolt, then the lock in the doorknob. "Mom?" she calls. "I'm home!"

There's a long pause - too long - before Mom replies, "In the living room, honey!"

Jessica lets the door drop closed behind her, and starts down the long hallway past their bedrooms to the kitchen. Surely it's only her own imagination that she can hear the animal rasp of Dad's breath, the terror-quick tattoo of Mom's heartbeat. Surely she can't smell the new-penny tang of blood.

Somehow her own pulse is steady as anything. It feels like her arteries jump with every heavy beat. The hallway seems to flex in front of her. Jessica blinks, shakes her head; when she opens her eyes again, everything is... different. Sharper, but the colors are wrong, and the shadows look strange.

She hears noises from up ahead: flesh on fabric, flesh on flesh, bone on bone. Dad has Mom by the arm and has shaken her so hard her teeth click together, probably to stop her from trying to warn Jessica that he's here.

"I'm coming, Mom," Jessica hears herself say, before things start changing inside her mouth. It doesn't hurt, exactly, but it's very, very strange to feel new teeth spring from her gums where there shouldn't be room for them, to feel all of her teeth lengthen and broaden, to somehow have all of this happen behind her human lips.

Her hands are what change next. Her palms get smaller as the bones of her fingers warp, as her nails harden and blacken and sharpen into claws. She can feel the rest of the change waiting for her, that there is much, much more to be had. There is an entire new animal that Jessica could become. She holds it off, though - the little things that have shifted so far have been silent, but she's certain Dad would hear anything more - and goes to greet her parents.

When it's over, Dad is finally dead, Mom is wounded but standing under her own power, and Jessica is a wolf.

Thank goodness they have the weekend to recover.

* * *

Mom sits down, hard, on the couch, dropping Jessica's X-Acto knife on the floor. With an anxious whine, Jessica comes away from Dad's body and puts her bloody chin on Mom's knee. "I'm okay, sweetheart," Mom says. "I think." She pats Jessica's head with a heavy hand.

Avoiding the spill of wolfsbane water on the couch and the floor, Jessica hops up to sit next to Mom and inspect for herself. Thankfully, Mom hasn't been bitten (Jessica is certain Mom would smell different if she had) but she's got deep punctures and gouges from Dad's claws up and down her right arm. Jessica hunkers down, holding Mom's wrist between her paws, and starts licking the wounds clean.

Mom's scent changes minutely - what is that, wariness? It's not quite fear - but she doesn't try to pull away. Under Jessica's ministrations the claw marks soon stop bleeding, and Jessica is able to sit up and will herself to turn into a girl again.

Mom watches the transformation closely, but Jessica doesn't mind; she's too busy trying to catalogue how it feels, as her urgency when she'd been fighting Dad had made the shift into her wolf form feel like falling off a cliff. Shifting into a girl feels like a hundred different things: one moment it's as fiddly as trying to get toothpaste back into its tube, and the next it feels like the relief of shedding a heavy coat when the weather's too warm. She keeps expecting it to be painful, especially when her bones start moving around inside of her, but everything rolls and clicks into place like the smoothest of machinery. After she's upright and fur-free and blunt-toothed and tailless, her senses are the last to re-align. Though they're still better than they used to be before she shifted, they're not as acute as they were when she was the wolf, and it's a relief to have all the colors back.

"You kept your clothes," Mom observes. "Everything but your sneakers."

Her sneakers she'd had to claw off. Jessica can see them strewn in pieces across the linoleum in the kitchen. "Sorry, Mom." Sneakers are expensive.

"Well, the shoes are a shame, but well done on the clothes," Mom says. "I don't know where they go when you transform, but that's a nifty skill to have. Your dad always lost his." She casts a contemptuous look at the pale, naked corpse on her living room carpet.

"I'm a werewolf," Jessica says.

Mom chokes out a laugh. "Yeah, honey, you are."

Jessica has Dad's blood on her face, on her hands and forearms, under her fingernails, streaked up and down her legs, drying in her hair. Funnily, the blood in her mouth is all Mom's now, and it's - it tastes different from the way Dad's did. His blood in her mouth, his flesh in her teeth, was necessary and right, but it was brackish with his bloodlust, his special awful brand of madness. Dad tasted like his own death. Mom's blood is clean and uncomplicated, maybe because Jessica didn't draw it, maybe because of Jessica's intentions when she licked clean the wounds that Dad inflicted. Jessica takes Mom's hand, turns her arm a little bit to look at the clawmarks. They're already scabbing over.

"I'm a werewolf," Jessica says again, "but I won't be like him. I'll never hurt you."

"I know," Mom says.

"I swear I'll do whatever it takes," Jessica says. "We'll lock me up on the full moon, I'll wear ash wood and silver, I'll drink wolfsbane water. Whatever I have to do. I won't be like him."

"Honey, I know," Mom says, and opens her arms. Jessica falls into them, tucking her chin over Mom's shoulder and wrapping her arms around Mom's waist. Mom's arms cross behind her, squeezing her tight. They both smell like fading sweat and blood and fear, but Mom's heartbeat is like a metronome and she's starting to smell like something else: something warm and buttery and sweet and big.

"What are you feeling right now?" Jessica asks, inhaling heavily through her nose.

"Why? Are - are you _sniffing_ me?" Mom holds Jessica even tighter and laughs. "What are you doing?"

"This is crazy, I can smell..." Inhale. "Relief." Cucumbers and ice water and something herbal, Jessica doesn't know what. Inhale. "Exhaustion." Dry oats and mothballs. Inhale. "Curiosity." Ink in a bottle and cloves and bell peppers. "But there's something else and I can't..."

Mom laughs again. Her amusement smells like dish soap bubbles and cranberry juice. "The number of times we say 'I love you' and it's the one smell you can't figure out."

"Oh." Jessica presses her face to Mom's neck and breathes it in. The smell is rising like baking bread and still warm like it too, melted butter without salt, lavender honey in hot milk. It goes straight to her head. Of course it's love. "I love you, Mom." She squeezes her eyes shut against the sudden pressure of tears. "I love you."

"I love you too, sweetheart. More than anything." Mom collects Jessica like she's pulling armfuls of laundry out of the dryer, lifting her long skinny legs into her lap. "You were so brave today. You saved both of us."

"I was so scared."

"So was I. And we did what we had to do anyway."

"I didn't get your message until school let out. I thought I'd be too late."

"You weren't too late. You got here in time and you kicked his ass."

The noise Jessica makes is half-laugh, half-gasp. "Yeah, I did."

"You were smart about it too, bringing weapons with you for me."

"They were going to be for me," Jessica says. "I thought - all the bottles of wolfsbane water we've got stashed everywhere, all the silver, I hoped you might -"

"Well, it looks like the silver myth is just a myth," Mom says. She sounds annoyed. "When he first got here, I stabbed him with that dagger we got from those druids in Pennsylvania and it didn't do anything. I think the other times that silver worked against him, it was because there was also wolfsbane or ash wood involved. Silver is useless on its own."

Jessica makes a high-pitched noise she doesn't even know how to classify and burrows even closer against Mom. If Dad had been less sadistic and more efficient, or less scattered-crazy and more focused-crazy, if he hadn't felt like waiting to torture Jessica and Mom together -

"It's okay, Jessica. I'm okay, baby. I love you. Can you... smell me? Does that help?"

It does. Jessica takes a deep breath, then another. She's starting to smell like milk-and-honey herself, from being so close to Mom while Mom's feelings are spilling everywhere. Mom gets a hand into Jessica's wild curly hair, long since tumbled loose from its bun, and scratches at Jessica's scalp. She's always been able to soothe Jessica this way. Jessica lets herself be gentled and slumps against Mom again.

"You know, your dad used to be able to smell emotions, too," Mom muses. "But he only ever mentioned fear. He loved knowing that people were afraid of him. Even before he went feral, he liked it."

"I remember," Jessica says. She'd only been three or four, but she can remember Dad in his human form threatening fights with people on the street or in grocery stores. He liked Jessica's fear, too: he'd feint at her to make her yelp.

"He could never really control the wolf, either," Mom says. "He'd black out completely on full moons. He could force the change from his human form to his wolf one the rest of the time, but it was anyone's guess if he'd shift halfway or all the way, and he couldn't always shift back. He could sort of steer himself around and sometimes he'd remember what he'd done after, but there was really no rationality to him, Jessica. Like he was today. Even only half-shifted it's like he was rabid."

"I know."

"What I mean is," Mom says, "you're nothing like him, baby. You knew me, even when you were a wolf. You tasted my blood to heal me and it didn't drive you mad. You shifted all the way on your first try, and when you needed to, you became human again. I've never seen a shift like that, either."

"Dad always screamed whenever he shifted," Jessica says. "I thought the shift would hurt, but it doesn't."

"You're _different_," Mom says. "You're my baby, and we love each other, and you don't want to hurt me, and I won't let you. But I don't think it'll be a problem, sweetheart. I don't know what you are, but you're a different kind of wolf from your dad. We'll be okay."

* * *

When Jessica and Mom finally get to their feet, the living room is painted in the shadows of a springtime early sunset. Tiptoeing her way around Dad's bloody and mangled bulk, Jessica yelps and hops away when she accidentally puts her foot down on a patch of carpet soaked in wolfsbane water. It feels like the acid burns she'd gotten once or twice in Chemistry, only worse and deeper.

"Are you all right?" Mom demands.

Jessica flicks the lightswitch by the door to the kitchen and leans against the wall, balancing on her good foot to examine her burnt one. "I think so," she says, blinking in the glare of the overhead light. The burn starts at the tip of her big toe and continues across the ball of her foot. It's pink and raw, oozing blood, with unsavory pale blue froth at the edges. "I think my body's trying to heal, but the wolfsbane is getting in the way," she says. "Can you get me some tap water to flush it out?"

Mom does, and Jessica pours it across the burn, hissing through her teeth at the sting. With the weird blue froth gone, though, the burn heals itself as Mom and Jessica watch: the blood dries, the scabs harden and then fade away, and then the new pink skin left behind darkens to a light brown until it's as though there was never any injury at all. "Goodness," Mom says.

"I was thinking maybe you should wash the clawmarks Dad gave you with some wolfsbane water before they close up altogether," Jessica says, nodding at Mom's arm. "Just in case. I know my cleaning them for you sped the healing up, but we don't know if there will be any, um-"

"-Weird wolfy side-effects?" Mom says. "That's a good idea."

Jessica sits at the kitchen table while Mom puts dried wolfsbane in a glass of water. She mixes it vigorously with a chopstick to make the wolfsbane dissolve, and then leans over the sink to rinse her arm. There isn't any noticeable effect; Jessica isn't sure if that means there was nothing wrong in the first place, or if the wounds are too well-healed for it to make a difference.

"Are you hungry?" Mom asks, after she's washed and dried the glass.

"I could eat," Jessica says.

"Let me scramble us some eggs," Mom says, and goes to rummage in the fridge.

From where she's sitting, Jessica can see the wreck of the living room: Dad's body, the blood spilled on the floor and splattered on the walls, the broken bookshelves, the fallen picture frames and accompanying shattered glass, the splintered screen of their TV. "How the hell are we even going to begin to clean this up?" she asks.

Mom looks up from where she's vigorously beating half a dozen eggs in a mixing bowl. "Really the only _big_ problem is what to do with your dad," she muses. "The rest can be fixed with some sweeping and mopping and Windex."

"The carpet's a lost cause," Jessica says.

"Well."

"And I'd say disposing of a body is a _pretty big problem_, wouldn't you?"

"You let me worry about that," Mom says.

"What? Seriously? Mom -"

"You ran to my rescue and saved both our lives today," Mom says. She puts a pan on the stove and cuts some slices of butter into it. "Let me handle this, okay?"

"Mom, this isn't like when whoever doesn't cook does the dishes," Jessica says. "Whatever we have to do, we're in this together."

"Jessica Luziana," Mom says, and Jessica's mouth shuts with an awkward click of teeth. Mom never brings out the middle name unless she's really serious. "You may be a werewolf, but you are still fifteen and I am still your mother. Tonight we will eat dinner, roll your dad up in the carpet, and go to a hotel for the night. Tomorrow, you will go to the Museum of Natural History to do your homework, and you will let _me_ handle cleaning up the living room. Do you understand?"

Mom stares at her until Jessica has to look away. She feels quite certain that, if she were a wolf right now, she'd have her tail between her legs. "Okay."

"Okay," Mom says, and pours the eggs into the pan. "Why don't you put the water on for tea?"

* * *

**I would love, love, LOVE to know what you think!**


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